I just couldn't help think about how stress impacts health as I read a new survey from Empirix showing that poor customer service in organizations not only costs companies billions of dollars but it adds to customer stress. More than a third of call center calls have poor voice quality according to the survey and more important is the fact that 30% of consumers surveyed said they had voice quality problems with more than half their calls while up to 68% of these people would hang up and potentially call a competitor.

So roughly 20% of customers calling could be hanging up and calling the competition because voice quality is sub par.

As the first week of the fall begins, there is a wealth of news to share such as China getting the iPad, Facebook status updates leading to burglaries, another high- level departure at Nokia and GoDaddy.com looking to sell itself for a billion dollars.

The pace of acquisitions hasn't slowed as of late - HP just announced it will acquire ArcSight to bolster its security offering and PAETEC will pick up Cavalier Telephone.

Perhaps the biggest news of all is Wal-Mart's entry into the MVNO space - they will be reselling T-Mobile's service.

If there is a common theme here - it's that technology continues to be full of opportunity as it becomes more common.

For some reason when I hear Sergey Brin wants Google to be the third half of my brain I feel a bit freaked out. Partially because they already know what everyone wants, desires - how often we search for our Exes, how often we check porn, etc. Then again, the next step seems to be logically implanting themselves in our heads so why am I surprised?

I just hope the third brain they put in me is out of Beta.

Then again, I could use some help from the Google guys when keeping track of all the excitement and new events surrounding ITEXPO.

It has been an extremely exciting week again for tech news and moreover for me personally as I got a chance to open up my Sony Dash and it is a very cool addition to my desktop as it allows me to view my photos and take advantage of widgets of all kinds which among other thinks allow me to see the pandas at the San Diego Zoo. This handy gadget has a slew of communications, social networking and calendar features as well but for now, I just want to see the pandas.

The big news from yesterday of course was Steve Jobs onstage pushing a slew of new iPods and a rental-only model for Apple TV and a social network integrated into iTunes.

Having recently purchased a Sony Dash which I still need to take out of the box, I am obviously intrigued by the idea of devices which allow widgets to run on them. Apparently Alcatel-Lucent too is enamored with the concept of widgets and mobile apps as the company just picked up OpenPlug, a company focused on cross-platform application development solutions. This purchase follows on the acquisition of ProgrammableWeb a major resource to the development community involved in mashups and web-based APIs.

Tech once again has been an amazingly vibrant market in the last week of August when news is generally slow. A recent trend has to do withtechnology companies playing nice with global governments to make sure they aren't rejected or find themselves out of favor like Google happens to be in China.

Nokia Spices up its Servers

Nokia for its part has decided to put servers in India to comply with local laws allowing government officials access to once impenetrable communications systems. You may recall India recently had some issues with not being able to monitor messages sent on Blackberrys.

I was a huge fan of SkyFire on Windows Mobile as it approximated the iPhone Safari browser on a Windows Mobile device while also supporting Flash. Now it seems this browser is coming to the iPhone and I wonder if Apple will force the company to disable the Flash support to ensure it abides by the company's rules of not allowing other "programming languages" to run on it.

It's been a busy day in the world of tech news as Google who already has a telecom service in Google Voice has expanded it into Gmail with a two-pronged goal of making it easier to call via Google's network and making the Skype IPO less lucrative. In addition, cloud computing has heated up with Nimbula receiving $15 million dollars so the ex-Amazon founders can purse providing private cloud services.

On the TMC front, we officially released TechZone360, our new site dedicated to all things tech and sporting a new and cool interface we hope you love. My readers got an unauthorized sneak peak last week (thanks for not squealing on me) and you can see it has evolved quite a bit these past days.